Today we took more notes on Ancient Greece:
- Although fertile valleys cover 1/4 of the peninsula only 20% is arable (farmable)
- Greek diet consisted of grains, grapes, olives and fish
- lack of resources most likely led to Greek colonization
- Temperatures ranged from mid 40s in winter to low 80s in the summer
- Mycenaeans:
- influence began around 2000 BCE
- located on a rocky ridge on Peloponnesus, protected by a 20 foot- thick wall
- kings dominated Greece from 1600-1100 BCE
- controlled trade
- 1400 BCE- Mycenaeans invaded Crete and absorbed Minoan Culture
- *Cultural Diffusion*
- writing system, language, art, politics, literature, religion
- Around 1200 BCE the mysterious "sea people" began to invade Mycenae and burnt palace after palace
- Dorians moved into war-torn region
- Dominated from 1150-750 BCE
- less advanced
- trade based economy collapsed
- writing disappeared for 400 years
- Greek oral tradition- stories passed on by word of mouth
- Homer lived at the end of these "greek dark ages"
- composed stories (epics) of the Trojan War c. 750-700 BCE
- The Iliad- possibly one of the last conquest of the Mycenaeans (The Trojan War)
- The Odyssey- Odysseus attempts to return home after Trojan War, being thwarted by the angry god of the sea, Poseidon
- The Odyssey was 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter
- Homeric Question : homer may have been a mythical creation himself
- blind wandering minstrel; a heroic figure
- Did he exist?
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